Raconteurs regale
AMRITA TALWAR
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The oft-neglected art of daastangoi got a shot in the arm with a session in the Capital this past week.
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Photo: Anu Pushkarna
BLAST FROM THE PAST A daastangoi workshop in progress.
What happens when storytellers, aspiring writers and bloggers come together over a cup of coffee? Their casual interaction and ideas eventually take the shape of a highly gripping story, a daastan.
This is what happened at the Daastangoi storytelling workshop organised by Caferati, a writers group, at the Attic in New Delhi.
The workshop was conducted by daastangos (narrators) Mahmood Faroouqi, and Danish Husain who are trying to revive this art of storytelling. Daastangoi is an ancient art of narrating daastans where goi is the narrator.
According to Danish, these are tales, which are screaming to be read aloud. This form was practiced in Persia, which came into India in the 19th Century. Daastangos conveyed events in words, images, and sounds. Although daastans continued to be published till well into the 1940s their popularity, both as a printed story and as a live performance, had clearly started diminishing. Mir Baqar Ali was considered the last Daastangoi, he died in 1928.
For his performances, Mahmood refers to Dastan-e Amir Hamza, the largest fictional narrative composed in Urdu, written in 46 volumes. Though the main stories were based on the tours of Hamza and his family to far off lands, the sub-plots, according to Mahmood, “also include secular activities such as sharab, shabab or kabab (wine, women and merriment)”.
“I met Mahmood at the Virasaat festival in Dehra Dun. Mahmood was performing there too. Being a theatre artist I couldn’t resist practicing this art. I am an actor, have written short stories. I was quite familiar with the role of a storyteller.”
At the workshop, Mahmood explained the oral story telling tradition and conducted a small listening activity — a recorded narration of Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”. The story is a classic, and urged the participants to listen to the sounds, words, intonation and tone. He later asked the audience to recreate their Toba Tek Singh using the same sounds as in the narration.
“This piece is a classic example of a Daastan and there are many ways to narrate it. Each one of us has a story, which will have a character similar to Toba Tek Singh,”" says Mahmood. No props were allowed.
No props
According to Danish unlike other forms of storytelling where props are used, “you cannot rely on props to narrate Daastans. The tools for a Daastangoi are text, body language, expressions, gestures, voice modulation and the ability to interact with the crowd.”
The audience was asked to create a story out of three words — prince, America and accident. A daastaangoi would do more than recite stories. They would create stories out of nothing. On similar lines, Mahmood made the audience sit in a circle and created a chain story.
He urged the people to be spontaneous and creative. The story created by the group had everything right from romance to guns to fire to beautiful locales.
Each person contributed and for most writers got their potential story ideas by just listening to this chain story. Such is a daastan! Danish is also a part of Caferati, which according to him was collaboration over too much coffee. Small group of writers who meet online at a message board, “wherever the coffee is good, plentiful and cheap”.
Says Anita Vasudeva of Caferati, “Storytelling is an important learning exercise for writers for there is a connection between oral and the written tradition. For a storyteller imagination is stronger than knowledge, myth is more potent than history. Dreams are more powerful than facts and love is stronger than death.”
And daastangoi?
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